This page is designed to get you acquainted with the wiki. Below are several resources that should help you better understand how you can use wikis in your classroom. We have created a few short video tutorials to help guide you. They are all around three minutes long.
Video Tutorials
Tutorial One: Learning the Basics
Tutorial Two: Understanding Versions
Tutorials
Once you've watched the videos, go play around.
Wikis: A Critical Look
At first glance, the wiki may seem like "just another new technology." On the contrary, its potential impact on the way we construct and consume information has led many in the academic world to consider its critical applications in the classrooms. Below are a few of those considerations.
| Using Wikis as Collaborative Writing Tools: Something Wiki This Way Comes--Or Not! by Susan Loudermilk Garza and Tommy Hern in Kairos. Fall 2005. |
Excerpt: "...this required negotiation of space (within a wiki) can lead to a better understanding of the social processes that underlie any collaborative activity. In these ways, wikis not only build constructive communities of writers, but also accommodate differences among members of these communities, which in turn can allow all voices to contribute to the conversation.
| Romantic Poetry Meets 21st-Century Technology by Brock Read in The Chronicle of Higher Education , July 15, 2005. |
Excerpt: "In the past year, more and more professors have started talking about wikis, which are, in essence, communal Web sites that can be edited by anyone who visits them, and some wikis keep logs of past changes. Once the domain of technology enthusiasts, especially advocates of "open source" software that is jointly created by volunteers, wikis are growing increasingly popular in some unlikely corners of academe."
| Virtues of Wiki by M.C. Morgan, English professor at Bemidji State University. |
Excerpt: "Once we consider writing as more than generating words to suit, once we consider it forming meaning, relating pieces, connecting, establishing relations... Once we consider composing more dynamic than the page, it becomes clear that a wiki can encourage this fuller sense of what writing entails."
| The future of rational-critical debate in online public spheres by Matt Barton in Computers and Composition , 2005. |
Excerpt: "The strength of the wiki, then, is its presentation of a document as a process of rational-critical debate towards a specific goal."
Additional Resources
- For Teachers New to Wikis.html* Wikipedia
- Wikis (CollegeWriting)
- Wikibooks
- Wikitionary
- Thesaurus
- Wikiversity Online university in a wiki; really amazing
Some interesting background on Wiki's from http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki, the original WikiWeb:
- Wiki History
- Introduction to Wikis
- Wikis put to good use: examples
- Getting a Wiki Adopted
- Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not
Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham <-- creator of wiki
